I feel your pain.
A long time ago, I led part of a project that involved an embedded PC.
Here is what I learned.
<boring story> <somewhat abbreviated>
We needed a motherboard. Generic/commodity motherboards were available at very attractive prices. Management would not hear of using 'industrial' boards because of their higher prices.
It turns out that virtually all motherboards start out as reference designs from a chipset vendor, e.g. Intel.
Low-overhead outfits buy the design, artwork, etc., and add and remove features to differentiate their particular version.
Invariably, the work is done by inexpensive self-educated folks who have only a marginal understanding of things like bus timing. ... which they invariably screw up in their efforts to save nickels and be heroes.
In the typical six months that it took for our meticulous EE to measure the chip timing, find all the mistakes, and qualify at least one of a sample of half a dozen different brands of motherboards, the going price for said motherboard would rocket down from $300 to $50, at which time the motherboard vendor could no longer make money on it and would go out of business. ... and we would start the qualifying cycle over again with a whole new set of cutthroat optimistic startup motherboard 'vendors'.
Our core functional requirements could then, and today, be satisfied by an 8088. But the bottom fell out of the market in a year, and in turn we were forced to go to 286, 386, 486, Pentium, etc. ... at which time I was asked to leave for unrelated reasons. I have no idea what they embed now...
</boring story>
I'm guessing that a similar bottom-falling-out cycle may occur in industrial motherboards, too, hopefully with a longer period.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
